Latest Climate Change Reports and Tools

RealityDrop is a new interactive tool designed to profoundly impact the conversation on climate change. To fight denial where it’s happening and spread the truth about man-made climate change, Reality Drop finds climate news from around the web and connects it with the most relevant science. Then it engages web visitors to use the easy social media sharing tools to spread the truth.

The 2013 National Climate Assessment Report has been released for public comment. The draft document is a synthesis of the work of 13 federal agencies and their understanding of climate change and its current and anticipated impacts to our nation. The National Climate Assessment (NCA) is being conducted under the auspices of the Global Change Research Act of 1990. The GCRA requires a report to the President andÂ the Congress every four yearsÂ to help them make wise and informed policy choices. The public comment period is open until 12 April 2013. The draft report is available for download at http://www.globalchange.gov/what-we-do/assessment.

United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports.The U.N. report’s climate simulations predict a warmer and wetter Earth, with global temperature increases of 3.6 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (2 to 4 degrees Celsius) by 2100, about the same warming that occurred following the Last Glacial Maximum almost 20,000 years ago, except about 100 times faster.

Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation
How well prepared are we? In this special report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we need to get vulnerable people out of harm’s way. The report is the outcome of cross-disciplinary teamwork among 220 scientists in 62 countries studying the physical aspects of climate change; scientists with expertise in impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability; and as well as experts in disaster risk management.

Associated YouTube Video: In Harm’s Way
httpv://youtu.be/Fq8P9RhEpiQ

Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis by National Academy of Sciences National Research Council Committee On Assessing the Impacts of Climate Change On Social and Political Stresses chaired by John D. Steinbruner, Ph.D., Prof. of Public Policy, School of Public Policy, and Director, Center for International and Security Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland. Steinbruner says, “We are adding CO2 to the atmosphere at a rate that is outside the bounds of the entire 65-million-year paleoclimate record. The Earth has never experienced a thermal impulse occurring at this rate ever before.”

NASA – Climate Change May Bring Big Ecosystem Changes
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., investigated how Earth’s plant life is likely to react over the next three centuries as Earth’s climate changes in response to rising levels of human-produced greenhouse gases. Study results are published in the journal Climatic Change.

World Bank Turn Down the Heat Report
The world is barreling down a path to heat up by 4 degrees by the end of the century if the global community fails to act on climate change, according to a new scientific report released from the World Bank. Such inaction would trigger a cascade of cataclysmic changes that include extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, and sea level rise affecting hundreds of millions of people. “The lack of action on climate change not only risks putting prosperity out of reach of millions of people in the developing world, it threatens to roll back decades of sustainable development.” – Jim Yong Kim, President, World Bank

Let’s hope the World Bank takes its own advice. According to the World Resources Institute, the World Bank Group is currently spending over $5 billion to finance the construction of 29 coal-burning power plants around the globe.

Images

Click on thumbnail image below for a larger view and to download the image:

Graphs showing carbon dioxide during 2012 in Earth’s atmosphere.U.S. Drought Monitor Update for January 1, 2013According to the January 1 U.S. Drought Monitor, moderate to exceptional drought covers 61.1% of the contiguous